A cover-story interview with Cynthia Ozick, discussing her book The Puttermesser Papers, with a full transcript of the interview

Imagine a novel that took thirty-five years to write. In an age when writers become instant superstars and publish five books before reaching thirty, it’s almost inconceivable. But for Cynthia Ozick, age sixty-nine, half a lifetime on a book is just the right speed.

In
the early 1960s, the young Cynthia Ozick (pronounced with the same vowel sounds
as “Moses”) wrote a story called “Puttermesser: Her Work, Her Ancestry, Her
Afterlife.” The story introduced lawyer and feminist Ruth Puttermesser, a
character who would stay with Ozick for the rest of her life. Since publishing
the story in The New Yorker, Ozick has revisited Ruth about once a
decade, adding another chapter to what would eventually become The
Puttermesser Papers.

“This was
always conceived as a novel,” Ozick says, speaking from her home in New York,
“but the labor of giving birth to the novel was extraordinarily gradual. I
began it at age thirty-four. And how do I remember that very accurately?
Because of the weird program I had for the novel, I smuggled my age into every
chapter. … I conceived these chapters as a high point of each decade of her
life, and the idea was to write the slowest novel in the world.”

Ozick
included the first two chapters of the Puttermesser saga in her brilliant 1982
collection Levitation, which is where many readers got their first taste
of Ruth. The first chapter finds Ruth working as a cog in the New York
Department of Receipts and Disbursements. Although a dedicated city worker, she
yearns for a more meaningful connection to history—a connection she ultimately
invents for herself in her head.

It’s
an amazing story, so complete and self-contained that almost any short story
writer would be satisfied to leave Ruth where she was. But the second chapter,
“Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” goes to an entirely new level of literature. A
decade or so older, Ruth finds herself fired from her job by sinister
politicos, so she retaliates by taking over the city. She achieves this by
unwittingly fashioning the soil from her houseplants into a golem, a legendary
Frankensteinish creature from Jewish folklore, that helps her fulfill her “Plan
for the Resuscitation, Reformation, Reinvigoration & Redemption of the City
of New York.” The golem helps Ruth run for mayor under the auspices of the
“Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Idealism” party. And Ruth wins.

By
creating the golem to help bring order to New York, Ruth mimics God sitting
back in the celestial easy chair, declaring it all to be good.

“It
goes way, way back to Genesis,” Ozick says, “where God creates man out of earth
and blows a wind into his nostril. And Adam is made out of earth. In fact his
name, Adam, means ‘clay,’ means ‘earth.’ So it really goes way, way back to the
primordial infrastructure of the human mind—the idea that you can in a sense
compete with the creator of the universe and create life. … This idea of
creating human life out of nothing is just endemic in us.”

What’s
even more fascinating about the story is that while Ruth creates, she is also
created, which carries tremendous writerly implications. Ruth imitates God the
creator, certainly, but she also imitates Ozick the writer.

“Puttermesser
has made the golem,” Ozick says, “but the golem has made Puttermesser mayor, so
who created whom? Writers write books, and it’s the fact that they’ve made
books that makes them writers. It is a cycle. Your characters make you. You
also learn from your characters. And you don’t know where they come from. You
don’t know where they’re going. You don’t know even their voices when you
start. And when you’re finished you feel very much added to—some new grains of
being have augmented your own being because this stuff has come out of you. And
then you’re different afterwards.”

At
their zenith, Ruth and her creation, Xanthippe, turn New York into a kind of
neo-Garden of Eden. But after a certain point, things begin to crumble. Like
Milton in reverse, Ozick charts the rise and fall of humanity—as personified by
a rapacious, oversexed golem—and even at its zaniest, the story resounds with
deep pathos for our doomed race.

And
if that weren’t enough, Ozick brings back the postlapsarian Ruth three
more times. The third and middle chapter, “Puttermesser Paired,” finds Ruth in
love with painter Rupert Rabeeno, whom she meets at the Met as he paints an
imitation of The Death of Socrates. Rabeeno calls his works reenactments
rather than imitations, but any way you look at it, he’s an imposter.

“I
am really, really interested in impersonation—fakes and imposters,” Ozick says.
“I’ve always been interested in the word ‘imposter.’ In fact, I remember my
excitement as a child when I first came upon that word in a fairy tale. And I
decided that my own father might be an imposter. And I tested him. Because my
real father was the only one who knew the combination to the safe. ... The idea
of impersonation is absolutely fascinating. And because, after all, it’s what
every fiction writer does. You impersonate other people.”

But
Rupert’s impersonation leads Ruth down a dangerous path. In lieu of sex, the
two read to each other from George Eliot’s novels, and then from various Eliot
biographies, and along the way Ruth slowly tries to mold her relationship with
Rupert into George Eliot’s relationship with George Lewes. Their love for each
other then becomes little more than a paper chase, an imitation of real life.

The
tension between paper and life has been a central concern of much of Ozick’s
work. Her 1987 novel The Messiah of Stockholm features a predicament
similar to Ruth’s and Rupert’s, when a book reviewer falls into an
all-consuming obsession with finding Bruno Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The
Messiah. Ozick describes this fascination with paper as one of the
controlling factors of her life:

“I
think I once wrote a little tiny thing that might have been in a collection
called Metaphor & Memory in which I said, ‘I do not like life. It
interrupts.’ … Paper comes before life for me. And life does interrupt, and it
torments me.”

So
“Puttermesser Paired” can either be read as a cautionary tale—because Ruth gets
burned in a big way—or as a triumph, because Ozick herself has created such a
masterful work of imitation. Life becomes secondary, true, but who needs life
when the story is so good?

The
fourth chapter, “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” has been chosen for
next year’s Best American Short Stories under a different title and in a
shortened form. Which may be ironic, because it’s the least Ozicky of all the
chapters in The Puttermesser Papers. There are no golems, assumed
identities, or imagined histories here, just the tale of Ruth’s Russian cousin
coming to America. It’s a great story, but it’s telling that the least
fantastic chapter in the book would be the one chosen for mass consumption.

The
final, chapter, however, is where the action is. In “Puttermesser in Paradise”
Ozick finally knocks Ruth off and sends her to Heaven—at just shy of the
Biblical age of threescore and ten. Lying in bed, reading Thomas Mann’s Joseph
and His Brothers, Ruth gets attacked, killed, and raped—in that order—by a
ski-masked intruder.

“I always
knew I would kill her off when she got to my present age,” Ozick says. “But I
did not know that it was going to be this vicious, this horrifying.”

Even
more horrifying is the Paradise Ruth finds. She’d always imagined it as a place
of eternal reading and eating, but what’s waiting for her is endless ambiguity.
Paradise for Ruth ends up being all things at all times—and all being as
meaningless and self-canceling as the Solomonic vision of the world laid out in
Ecclesiastes.

“All
her life has consisted of almost hitting climax and then withdrawal or
detumescence before truly hitting climax,” Ozick says. “Or let’s put it this
way—climax and anti-climax. So though I did not know what her Paradise was
going to be, it had to be consistent with the nature of her DNA. Her DNA is to
dream, to imagine, to utopianize, and then to be struck on the head by
reality.”

Ozick
begins the chapter with a poem that purports to be “translated from the Akkadian”
but which Ozick admits to having made up herself:

“Knit and
unravel,

Commands the
Gavel.

Do and undo,

Till nothing’s
true.”

And
that’s exactly what Ozick does with Ruth. Negating much of what we learned
about Ruth in earlier chapters, Ozick writes her away “till nothing’s true.”

“I
think this book as a whole is a mediation on mortality, on evanescence, on the
ephemeral,” Ozick says. “It’s a little book about—not what Shakespeare means
when he says ‘Ripeness is all,’ but just the moment after. … Because ripeness
is all, but then the next step after ripeness is decay. Unless you devour at
the moment of ripeness. But we don’t always get to devour at the peak of
ripeness. … And therefore it may not be true that ripeness is all—it may be true that
decay is all. And when you begin to think that decay is all, then you’re
thinking about the human condition and mortality, which is the heart and soul
of everything in our lives. It makes ambition. It makes tragedy. It makes
comedy. Being the creature that is conscious, the only creature that knows our
end… what is going to happen to us—no other creature knows it—that is why
mortality dominates our lives and also makes us write. Because we’re writing
against that doom.”

What
makes this book remarkable—aside from Ozick’s outrageous imagination and
astonishing prose—is that it actually incorporates the doom as it rages against
the dying of the light. For Ruth there is a time to be born and a time to die,
and Ozick funnels it all together into the same time and place. And even if
nothing’s true, as Ozick writes, at least we have this amazing book as a
testament to our struggle against the meaningless doom.

—David Wiley

An Interview with Cynthia Ozick

by David Wiley

for The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Conducted June 19, 1997

Published July 2nd, 1997

How did The Puttermesser
Papers come to be a novel?

CO: This was always
conceived as a novel, but the labor of giving birth to this novel was
extraordinarily gradual. I began it at age thirty-four. And how do I remember
that very accurately? Because I smuggled my age—because of the weird program I
had for this novel I smuggled my age into each chapter. So Puttermesser is
thirty-four, and in the next one she’s forty-two or forty-six, I forget. And
the next one I got a little cagey and called her fifty-plus. And the next one I
got a little Biblical. As you see, I conceived these chapters as a high point
of each decade of her life, and the idea was to write the slowest novel in the
world. And I always knew I would kill her off when she got to my present age.

You were planning on this age?

Yes. I was going to kill her off
before she hit threescore and ten, the Biblical age—just before that.

Could you talk about the
chapters’ publishing history?

The first chapter was in The
New Yorker. The second chapter was in Salmagundi. The third chapter
was in The New Yorker. The fourth chapter was in The New Yorker,
shortened and under another title. And under that title, it was chosen for the Best
American Short Stories. And, I’m missing a chapter, I think. Anyway, the
last one, “Puttermesser in Paradise,” was in the May Atlantic. “The
Muscovite Cousin” was in The New Yorker—I’m going backwards now—under
the title “Save My Child!”

“Save My Child” was in The
Best American Short Stories?

It isn’t out yet. It’s next
year—it’s basically an excerpt from the chapter called “The Muscovite Cousin.”
That is going into I guess the 1998 Best American Short Stories, which
includes the stories published in 1997.

Wasn’t some of that story
taken from an essay in Fame & Folly?

I wrote a piece on Isaac Babel—I
think it was called “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.” And in there I
wrote about the visit of a Russian cousin, a Muscovite cousin to me. And yes, I
have to confess there is a relationship. But I also have to insist that fiction
is fiction, and once this actual visit entered the world of imagination it was
no longer fact. It’s very important to me that a separation be made from essays
and fiction and that the essays never be used as a measuring stick against the
fiction. I think this is really a kind of lethal thing to do to a writer of
fiction.

How much of this did you have
planned from the beginning?

The details I didn’t know, but I
knew it was going to be a very slowly rising idea and that I was going to wait
till I had the right formulation that would apply to Puttermesser, as opposed
to some other fictions. And when some idea came to me—some fictive idea that I
recognized immediately as “this belongs to Puttermesser,” and I waited for
those moments. And I don’t think I really planned it to be one a decade, but it
did more or less come out like that.

In “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” you focus on the
relationship between the creator and the created.

It is a very intriguing idea, as
I clearly don’t have to tell you. It’s the kind of thing that makes—we have to
think about Mary Shelley, naturally. And it goes way, way back to Genesis, where
God creates man out of earth and blows a wind into his nostril. And Adam is
made out of earth. In fact his name, Adam, means “clay,” means “earth.” So it
really goes way, way back into the primordial infrastructure of the human
mind—the idea that you can in a sense compete with the creator of the universe
and create life. The idea of cloning, and particularly as applied to human
cloning—it takes people’s breath away. I mean so much that Clinton said that
we’re not allowed to do it in this country. He placed a moratorium on human
cloning. This idea of creating human life out of nothing is just endemic in us.
A lot of nature religions, like Native American—you’re in Minnesota, so you’re
really close to this—Native American religions have the God himself or herself,
the God or the Goddess, made out of earth. I guess it’s also related to the
fact that things grow out of the ground, which, when you think about it like a
visitor from another galaxy, is quite amazing. That you stick a seed in the
ground and a tree comes up. And I think it’s all related to the sense of human
wonder at the procreation that’s endemic in the planet.

What’s fascinating is that Ruth Puttermesser is also
created as she creates. And that seems to have a lot of writerly aspects to it.

Yes. I see what you mean. Yes,
that Puttermesser has made the golem, but the golem has made Puttermesser
mayor, so who has created whom? Right—I think that’s quite true. Writers write
books, and it’s the fact that they’ve made books that makes them writers. It is
a cycle. Your characters make you. You also learn from your characters. And you
don’t know where they come from. And you don’t know where they’re going. You
don’t even know their voices when you start. And when you’re finished you feel
very much added to—some new grains of being have augmented your own being
because this stuff has come out of you. And then you’re different afterwards.

From reading The Cannibal
Galaxy and other things, it seems like you’re fascinated with the tension
between Hellenism and Hebraism.

Yes.

Could you talk about how this
tension plays out in Ruth?

I’m not sure it is in Ruth
Puttermesser. I’m not aware that she necessarily thinks that way. Do you see
that?

Well, you give the golem she creates the name Xanthippe.

Well, actually you’re right about
that. Yes, of course. Because it’s quite true that in Jewish folklore the golem
is, as I expressed in that story, a sort of savior. And not an erotic creature
at all. And it’s true that Xanthippe does turn into a Greek goddess of Eros or
lust. You’re right, I simply overlooked that—a big thing to overlook. But, yes,
she does turn Greek, because she does turn into Eros rather voraciously. And in
that sense she’s Dionysian. And you know the split in the human mentality
between Apollo, the mind, the rational, and the Dionysian, the, what shall I
call it, the orgasmic—it’s really in all societies, in all religions.
Puttermesser’s really on the side of Apollo and the rational. I mean it’s very
clear. When she goes through the history of golem-making she’s quite interested
that the chief rationalist of all, the Vilna Gaon, who was an excoriator of
mystical movements that were rising up in European Jewish society in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this super-rationalist was said by
folklore—merely a legend—but that a legend should rise up that the greatest
rationalist of all should have created a mystical creature, this in a way
comforts her. But she’s definitely Apollo. She’s on the side of rationalism,
which means to be on the side of Hebraism, and not sympathetic to mysticism,
and yet her creation turns Hellenistic, just as you said.

The third story, “Puttermesser Paired,” features an
imposter, Rupert Rabeeno. It seems you’re really interested in fakes.

I am really, really interested in
impersonation—fakes and imposters. You’re absolutely right. I mean you really
have kind of hit a deep germ. I’ve always been interested in the word imposter.
In fact, I remember my excitement as a child when I first came upon that word in
a fairy tale. And I decided that my father—this is very glamorous, I thought—my
father, my own father might be an imposter. And I tested him. Because my real
father was the only one who knew the combination of the safe. So I tested my
father, made him open the safe, and then I knew he wasn’t an imposter. And I
knew I was, you know, acting out at the time. But you’re right, the idea of
impersonation is absolutely fascinating. And because, after all, it’s what
every fiction writer does. You impersonate other people. It’s also what actors
do, but actors don’t make up from scratch what they impersonate, and writers
do. I love the idea of impersonation. But I also have another theory about it,
which has to do with the character of writers. I think if writers impersonate
in life, then that is going in some way to contaminate them as writers. And I
think impersonation belongs in fiction and that you shouldn’t do it in life.

Is there a little bit of Wyatt Gwyon [from William Gaddis’
novel The Recognitions] in Rupert Rabeeno?

What an interesting idea! I never
thought of that. No, no. Maybe subliminally, because that’s one of my all-time
favorite books. Yes, Gaddis is remarkable. He’s one of our most extraordinary
contemporary writers. And The Recognitions is a great, great book, and I
read it when it was new. I kept it with me and read in it and in it and in it.
But not consciously here, and it’s quite interesting that you bring that up,
because I have been tremendously interested in that book. But a long, long time
ago, you know, when it first came out, and I haven’t read it since.

Rupert Rabeeno also seems to me like a kind of Gaddisy
name.

Well, Rabeeno is really a kind of
garden-variety Jewish name, you know. It’s a version of Rabinowitz without the
witz.

Speaking of writers of massive novels…

Infinite Jest—is that what
you were going to say?

David Foster Wallace and William Vollmann both cite you as
an influence, especially Wallace. He says he has a painting of you in his
house. This is kind of interesting, because you seem to revel in your
obscurity.

Well, reveling in never going out
of the house, for sure. If that’s what you mean by obscurity, having rather
reclusive impulses, I do. I mean I do go out and sort of live a normal life,
because—you remember Flaubert’s dictum, “Live like a bourgeois so that you can
write like a God.” And that’s sort of related to what I said before about not
impersonating in life—so that you don’t have to be a character or bohemian or
weirdo in life because then it dribbles out and you waste it. But if you hoard
it for the writing, and that’s exactly what Flaubert means in that remark.
About influential—I have no inkling of this.

There’s a third-person essay in Fame & Folly about
how you haven’t written enough and how you’re not important in any way—or I
assume it’s about you.

I think the two most interesting new writers working now
are Vollmann and Wallace, and they love you. I just think maybe someone should
tell you.

Well, thank you. It’s a little
bit inconceivable and interesting. I’ve written—I don’t think it’s in Fame
& Folly, it’s in an earlier collection—something about Cyril Connolly,
and the beginning of that has a little autobiographical patch about the early
years and a certain imprinting that happens to a writer who can’t get published
in early years. And listening to you, I can see that you’re not only out in the
stewpot, even in Minnesota, but you seem to be creating your own stewpot. And that
is the most valuable thing a young writer can do. So you can have me as a
horrible example of what not to do. And I’ve written about that—it’s called
“Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success.”

Did you want to say something
about Infinite Jest?

No, I just had an instinct that
you were going to mention David Foster Wallace.

Did you read it?

Actually, I have it on order. And
there’s a big, big article about him—where did I read this—oh, in the New
Republic. There’s a wonderful, long article about David Foster Wallace.

Infinite Jest is really wonderful.

Now I’m a little bit embarrassed
to say that I only have it on order and haven’t read it. But you know when
you’re trying to write fiction, there are periods where you don’t want to read
fiction, particularly by powerful voices. Because, for me anyway, I can get to
be a kind of ventriloquist.

Yes, it’s so hard to keep from channeling Kafka and
Proust—and you. And Bruno Schulz. Thank you for Bruno Schulz, by the way.

Channeling—what a funny way to
put it. It’s true. I think it’s the truest way to put it. Yes.

When I read The Messiah of
Stockholm I thought either that Bruno Schulz was the greatest writer of the
century, or else you were for inventing him. Because I’d never heard of him.

But that’s quite typical, and we
really owe our knowledge of Bruno Schulz to Philip Roth, who in the Writers of
the Other Europe series brought him to American, and really Western, attention.
And so he is really the hero of these Eastern European writers. Particularly Bruno
Schulz.

Did you read David Grossman’s book on Bruno Schulz [See Under: Love]?
It happened at almost the same time as your book.

Yes. It’s so interesting. An
israeli critic from a Hebrew University called me, and he said “Do you know
that there’s another book?” It hadn’t yet been translated, and it was still in
Hebrew, and he said “There’s another book written at exactly the same time
about Bruno Schulz.” So that was interesting.

From reading The Messiah of
Stockholm and some of your other works, it seems like you’re really
interested in cabalistic paper chases. Are you more interested in paper than in
life?

I’m afraid so. I think I once
wrote a little, tiny thing that might have been in a collection called Metaphor
& Memory in which I said, “I do not like life. It interrupts.”

In another interview you told
the story about how you were checking the page proofs for Trust in one
hand and rocking your baby with the other. And you said you were a little
shocked by the feeling that the page proofs felt more important than the life
in the crib.

You know, that baby is now
thirty-one, and she’s a professor of Near Eastern archeology, and she has a
baby of her own. And I do see the difference, because she writes papers, she
goes to conferences, and she’s, you know, your standard academic with a very
heavy program at Penn State. She and her husband both are in this together, and
they also took a four-month-old baby to a horrendous dig last summer. I tell
you all this because you can hear from this that there’s enormous intellectual
commitment, but I see in her a normality that I never had, which is that, with
all this configuration of commitment, that baby is all. And paper is
secondary. But you’re quite right. Paper comes before life for me. And life
does interrupt, and it torments me. Very often. Most of the time it interrupts.

I’m deeply shocked by the novel’s last chapter,
“Puttermesser in Paradise.” You knew she was going to die, but did you know it
was going to be like this?

I always knew it was going to be
a mugging, and of course that was in place in the very first chapter, with the
kind of standard New York fear of muggers. I always knew it was going to be a
mugging. I did not know that it was going to be this vicious, this horrifying.
And that, really, is where the whole question of impersonation comes in,
because in order to write a passage like that you really have to become that
guy in the sneakers. You have to change your sex, for one thing. And you have
to become deeply cruel and callous about life. And this is where Flaubert’s
“bourgeois” comes in and my “anti-impersonation in life” comes in, because I
would never murder or rape in life. But to do it in writing, I have to be
candid, there is a kind of relish in making that happen and shocking oneself
with how far one can go.

Are you glad she’s dead?

Yes.

Why?

Because it’s right. She
culminated. She had her consummation, and she was always heading for Paradise.
And all her life has consisted of almost hitting climax and then withdrawal or
detumescence before truly hitting climax. Or let’s put it this way—climax and
anti-climax. So though I did not know what her Paradise was going to be, it had
to be consistent with the nature of her DNA. Her DNA is to dream, to imagine,
to utopianize, and then to be struck on the head by reality. Because I think
this book as a whole is a mediation on mortality, on evanescence, on the
ephemeral. In that sense, it’s a little book about—not what Shakespeare means
when he says “Ripeness is all,” but just the moment after Shakespeare gets to
say that. Because ripeness is all, but then the next step after ripeness is
decay. Unless you devour at the moment of ripeness. But we don’t always get to
devour at the peak of ripeness, and we’re always just a little too late, so we come
into the decay that follows ripeness. And therefore it may not be true that
ripeness is all—it may be true that decay is all. And when you begin to think
that decay is all, then you’re thinking about the human condition and
mortality, which is the heart and soul of everything in our lives. It makes
ambition. It makes tragedy. It makes comedy. Being the creature that is
conscious, the only creature that knows our end, our goal, our aim, what is
going to happen to us—no other creature knows it—that is why mortality
dominates our lives and also makes us write. Because we’re writing against that
doom.

That story seems to be deeply influenced by Ecclesiastes.

Well, I think everything I’ve
said in the last few seconds is Ecclesiastes. I believe the human condition is
tragic, because it is governed by mortality. There’s a famous piece of dialogue
between two schools of thought, two first-century figures. One is the school of
Hillel, and one is the school of Shammai. Shammai is a literalist, and he wants
people to toe the line. And Hillel is tolerant, more easygoing, and much more
understanding of human failings, and they’ve never agreed about anything in
jurisprudence. You can divide them this way—mercy and justice—Hillel more on
the side of mercy and Shammai more on the side of justice. They’ve never agreed
on any matter that has come up before them. However—they did agree once on a
subject. Shammai said, thinking over the whole trajectory of human life, “It is
better not to have been born at all.” And it’s a very Buddhist point of view,
actually, you know—getting off the wheel of life. Hillel thought real hard
about this, and he saw the wisdom in it, and he did agree. But he added, “Yes,
it is better not to have been born at all, but since we have been born, let us
perform the commandments.” Namely, acts of conscience, mercy, and compassion.
And unless we’re very attracted by Eastern religions, I think in the West our
conscience is dominated by “but since we have been born, let us do acts of
compassion.”

That story seems more nihilistic than most of what you’ve
written.

Well, you know the little
proverb, the little Song of Paradise at the beginning that says “translated
from the Akkadian”? I made that up. That doesn’t really exist.

In the first chapter, Ruth imagines/invents her uncle. And
later we find that she’s invented even more about herself that we’d taken as
truth. Is she her own author?

That’s interesting. I think
that’s a fascinating conceit, but I think that conceit belongs to a critical
interpretation, not to the author.

I mean, it’s like you’re playing games with her existence,
like there’s nothing definite that we can believe about her.

Yes—do and undo.

So what’s next?

Well, I’ve committed myself to a couple of
essays. And the ceiling fell in, and it took six months of reconstruction, and
before that I had begun a short story which I hope to finish very soon. It’s
called “Actors,” and it’s based on my seven years in the theater. Somebody
asked me, “What were you doing in fiction between The Messiah of Stockholm and
The Puttermesser Papers?” And I had total amnesia, and it was very
frightening to me, and then I remembered, “Oh, my God! Yes—seven years of two
productions of a play.” And that taught me something about the nature of the
theater and how evanescent it is and that it’s all ephemera, because it’s all
on the side of experience. It’s on the side of life. It isn’t paper. So I
really am committed to paper, and I did spend seven years of my rapidly
diminishing span on life, which was the theater. But I wish it had been paper.
Then I would have had another novel.

It was a play version of “The Shawl”?

There was a lot of confusion
about that, because the producers insisted on giving it that name. It was not
an adaptation, it was a sequel, and it was a political play. And in the
out-of-town production it had a different name. It was Blue Light. And
in the New York production it was called The Shawl. As I say, at the
insistence of the director and the producers, and the director was Sidney
Lumet, who came back to the theater after thirty-five years of being in movies
and out of the theater. And that was kind of wonderful to work with such a
distinguished and revered movie name. And Dianne Wiest played Rosa. And
Mercedes Ruehl played Stella in the out-of-town version. And it was a marvel to
be in that world for so long. But the play was, as I say, a political play. It
was about Holocaust denial on one level, and on a more metaphorical level it
was about the seductiveness of the devil—that the devil always comes with sweet
talk. Also an ancient idea.

How different was it from “The Shawl”?

It used some of the same
characters. It uses Rosa. Stella became the main character. But it was a
sequel. It was not at all an adaptation. I wrote twenty-five versions of this
play. And that took seven years—almost a decade of my life given away to
something that isn’t here anymore, unlike a book.

There’s no printed version?

No. I haven’t been able to decide
which of the twenty-five versions, and so I’ve kept it out of print. It’s so
much a director’s medium, and the writer so much becomes an amanuensis of the
director, at least of this particular director, that I don’t know if I ever do
want it in print. I’m not decided.

For some reason, I’m having visions of Henry James being
booed off the stage.

Well, in a sense it happened.
Because the reviews in New York were very bad. They mostly concentrated on the
director, not on the writer. But the play was sold out, both out of town and in
New York and could have gone on and on for months, except that Dianne Wiest had
another obligation. And the producers didn’t want to go on without her, because
she was a very great draw, and so was Sidney Lumet. So I don’t know if it was
the play, you know, or the glamour of these two Hollywood figures. Probably
more the glamour of the Hollywood names. But there was enormous audience
enthusiasm—standing ovations every night. It had its excitements. But the
answer to the question “are you a paper person?”—the answer that I learned over
seven years is yes.

Did the applause affect you?

It’s very exhilarating. It’s
exciting. It’s extraordinary. I understood what Henry James was after. I had a
little bit of it. Yes, it’s very heady. It’s champagne. There’s no question.

Can you tell me a little bit
about your literary past, like what happened between OSU and Trust?

It’s all written about in the
Cyril Connelly essay. Briefly, I can tell you that I read and read and read and
read and read. And I was also writing another novel. I was writing a novel,
which was going to be a vast philosophical novel. I wrote about 300,000 words
of it. It was called Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love—M.P.P.L. And my
husband started calling it “Nipple” for short. And then I was making a joke
that this is the nipple on which I sucked for seven years. It was like the
Biblical wooing of Rachel and Leah, because seven years on Mercy, Pity,
Peace, and Love—that’s a line from Blake, as you probably recognize. And
then I abandoned that, and then another seven years on Trust.

Do you still have a reward for
someone who can finish Trust?

Yes. Actually, I met someone just
yesterday, but in order to have this gold medal struck I really need evidence.
And this person told me she had written a review and promised to give me
evidence. So we’ll see. We’ll see whether this is just an avaricious person
wanting gold. But I haven’t yet had to give anybody this gold medal. So I
haven’t had one struck yet.

I love long, complicated novels, so maybe I’ll give it a
try.

This one will daunt you, I think.
Although in my secret self I know that I’ve never written that well since. I’m
convinced of it.

I had always understood that you were unhappy with that
novel.

I like it better than anything
I’ve ever written. And I have to keep quiet about that, because it’s a deeply
minority opinion.

Do you want me to print that? Because I won’t if you want
to keep this to yourself.